Five grand, that's a large fraction of the cost of a new car. I could not really justify one, the opportunity cost is too high. It is a large fraction of the cost of a new kitchen, or a new bathroom, it would buy a very good camera kit (my new super duper camera cost a fraction of five grand), or you could stash it in a unit trust, and see it grow rapidly in 5 years or more.

This does seem to be different one as it has a very mixed bunch of objectives. The Nomarski prisms in this condenser were designed to work with the Olympus SPlan objectives and only the 20X is an SPlan.

You can get the same results as a £5000 microscope by using a cheap microscope and applying the emboss filter in Photoshop.

Waxcap wrote: . . . . The Nomarski prisms in this condenser were designed to work with the Olympus SPlan objectives and only the 20X is an SPlan. . . . .
Dave

Those Leitz objectives would work fine for DIC (at the correct condenser position for the appropriate objective power); they look to be among the ones with correction collars as well, probably better quality than the original Olympus ones . . .
Chris

(I have no axe to grind; agree it's a lot of money, but comparisons with cars are a bit misleading, as they wear out and depreciate considerably in value, so the new-to-old equation is not the same - the cost of a new DIC 'scope, now that is really scary)

Chris Yeates wrote:
Those Leitz objectives would work fine for DIC (at the correct condenser position for the appropriate objective power); they look to be among the ones with correction collars as well, probably better quality than the original Olympus ones . . .
Chris

Hi Chris.

Olympus makes different prisms for their own different ranges of lenses. As I said this condenser has prisms designed to work with their SPlan range. They did another NIC condenser for the BH2 (BHS and BHT) where the prisms were removable and they produced a range of individual prisms to work with their own different objectives. There are prisms matched to their DPlan Apo range, for instance.

In the Olympus document here http://www.alanwood.net/downloads/olymp ... ctions.pdf (kindly reproduced by Alan Wood) if you scroll down to VII (4) they have a table of Light Path Selection and a note underneath that says "Any objective other than those mentioned above cannot be used for interference contrast or phase contrast observation".

That doesn't mean that what you said above isn't true - I know that Charles Krebs says he prefers the DIC image when using prisms designed for the Olympus DPlan APO objectives with SPlan APO objectives - but I personally would opt for the safety of the Olympus recommendation (or that of someone like Charles, who has tested many combinations) rather than risk an expensive mistake.

Not specific to differential contrast but another issue with these LB finite objective microscopes is that a lot of the manufacturers had only part optical correction in the objective and the rest was done by the eyepiece, so the objective needs to be the same make as the eyepiece to be sure of the best image quality. Some manufacturers may have used the same corrections so they may match but you have to do your research.